Guest Post: U.S. Dollar Money Supply Is Underreported

March 1, 2010 – As the financial crisis has unfolded over the last
two years, the Federal Reserve has been responding in a variety of
unprecedented ways. Therefore, it is logical to assume that these
never-before-used actions have altered long-established ways of viewing
things. One area that has been impacted is the US dollar money supply.

The quantity of dollars in circulation is being underreported by relying upon the traditional and now outdated definitions used to calculate M1 and M2.
These ‘Ms’ are calculated and reported by the Federal Reserve based on
the following guidelines that identify the several different forms of
dollar currency used in commerce:

M1: The sum of currency held outside the vaults of depository institutions, Federal Reserve Banks, and the U.S. Treasury; travelers checks; and demand and other checkable deposits issued by financial institutions (except demand deposits due to the Treasury and depository institutions), minus cash items in process of collection and Federal
Reserve float.

These esoteric definitions can be confusing, so let’s bring US
dollar currency back to basics as the first step to explaining why
these definitions are no longer adequate.

There are two types of dollar currency comprising the money supply –
cash currency and deposit currency. Both are used in commerce to make
payments.

1) Cash Currency

The cash currency we carry around in our pockets is issued by the
Federal Reserve. Take a look at one of those green pieces of paper,
and you will see that they are labeled as a “Federal Reserve Note”. A note
is a debt obligation, and a few decades ago one could take that note to
a Federal Reserve Bank and ask them to make good on their debt by
redeeming it for silver, or until 1933, gold.

These liabilities of the Federal Reserve are no longer redeemable into anything, and are therefore “I owe you nothing” currency, a phrase made famous by legendary advocate of sound money, John Exter. Nevertheless, Federal Reserve notes remain a liability of the Federal Reserve.

2) Deposit Currency

Deposit currency is comprised – as its name implies – of dollars on
deposit in the banking system. These dollars circulate as currency
when payments in commerce are made with checks, wire transfers, plastic
cards and the like. In contrast to cash currency which circulates from
hand-to-hand, deposit currency circulates from bank account to bank
account.

Bank deposits take three standard forms – checking accounts, savings
accounts and time deposits. They have different maturities, or tenor, to use a banking term.

Dollars in checking accounts are considered to be the most liquid
because they are available on demand. Therefore, they are part of M1
because they are the most likely deposit currency to be used to make a
payment in commerce. Dollars in savings accounts are less likely to be
used to make a payment, but nonetheless are currency because they are
spendable. So they are part of M2, which comprises those dollars less
frequently used as currency.

The dollars in time deposits are used even less, but are currency
and therefore available for use in commerce when they mature, or
immediately if the tenor of the deposit is broken. They are –
depending on the size of the deposit – included in M2 or M3, which is no longer disclosed by the Federal Reserve.

Creating Currency

Having provided this background information, we can now get to the
heart of the matter by looking at how currency is created ‘out of thin
air’ by the Federal Reserve and banks and the impact of their actions
on the monetary balance sheet of the US dollar.

Cash currency of course is simply printed, but every note issued is
recorded on the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet. Basically, the Fed
‘monetizes’ an asset by turning it into currency.

If, for example, a bank sells a $1 million T-bill to the Fed, the
Fed ‘pays’ for it with $1 million of newly printed cash currency. The
Fed records the T-bill as an asset and the cash currency it issued as
its liability. These Federal Reserve Notes are the “currency”
component in the definition of M1 above.

The creation of deposit currency is similar. When a bank makes a
loan or purchases a security, it records the loan or security as its
asset and creates deposit currency as its liability. Simple
bookkeeping entries increase the bank’s assets and liabilities by the
same amount.

New deposit currency is created because the bank deposits the amount
of the loan in the borrower’s checking account, or similarly, credits
the account of the seller of the security it is purchasing. These
dollars are now available on ‘demand’ of the borrower or the seller of
the security.

Regardless whether deposit currency is created by the banking system
or the Federal Reserve, the net effect is the same – the quantity of
dollars increases. The total amount of deposit currency in checking
accounts is the “demand and other checkable deposits” component in the
definition of M1 above.

For historical reasons unimportant to the point of this analysis,
the Federal Reserve in the past has only created cash currency.
However, the unprecedented changes it has engineered over the past two
years have resulted in a vast amount of deposit currency being created
by the Fed. Instead of purchasing paper from the banking system solely
with cash currency – its traditional form of payment to ‘monetize’
assets by turning them into currency – the Federal Reserve since the
start of the financial crisis has increasingly relied upon deposit
currency to purchase paper.

Regardless how the Federal Reserve pays for the paper it purchases –
cash currency or deposit currency – it is creating dollar currency and
perforce expanding the money supply. But the traditional definition of
M1 does not accurately capture this process when the Fed uses deposit
currency to pay for its purchase. In fact, it is totally excluded.
Because the Federal Reserve did not create deposit currency in the
past, none of the Ms take it into account.

Consequently, the traditional definitions of the Ms are outdated
because they do not capture the total quantity of dollars in
circulation. Because M1 is underreported, so too is M2.

Unprecedented Deposit Currency Creation by the Fed

There has been an unprecedented amount of deposit currency created
by the Fed over the past two years. The following chart illustrates
this point. It shows the quantity of demand and checkable deposits, i.e., the amount of deposit currency, at the Federal Reserve since December 2002.

From December 2002 until the collapse of Lehman Brothers in
September 2008, the quantity of deposit currency created by the Fed
averaged $11.8 billion, an amount that is relatively insignificant
compared to total M1. Presently, it stands at a record high of
$1,246.2 billion, which of course is highly significant.

More to the point, none of this deposit currency is captured in the
traditional definition of the Ms. The quantity of dollar currency is
therefore significantly underreported, which is illustrated by the
following chart.

The Federal Reserve reports M1 to be $1,716 billion
as of February 15th. When deposit currency created by the Federal
Reserve is added to the traditional definition of M1, M1 after
adjustment is actually 170% higher at $2,918 billion. Its annual
growth increases to 29.5%, nearly 3-times the rate reported by the Fed
and more importantly, is an annual rate of growth in the quantity of
dollar currency that is approaching hyperinflationary levels.

This restatement of M1 explains why crude oil is back at $80 per
barrel; copper is $3.25 per pound; and commodity prices in the main are
rising in the face of weak economic conditions. The US dollar is being
inflated and worryingly, the rate of new currency creation is
approaching hyperinflationary levels. Unless the Federal Reserve
changes course, the US is headed for a deposit currency hyperinflation like those that plagued much of Latin America in the 1980s and 1990s.